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Friday, April 27, 2018

“Follow the Brush”: Vulnerability, Lyricism, and the Art of Creative Nonfiction

An Interview with
Susan Tekulve, author of Second Shift,
Essays of Susan Tekulve

By John Newlin

In her collection of intimate essays entitled Second Shift, Susan Tekulve has crafted
a brilliant series of highly autobiographical pieces.What makes them so powerful is that she
speaks to the universal qualities of beauty, pain, fear, and does so in a way
that makes us see that she is a person/writer/poet who is attentive to her
surroundings and deeply reflective of what she experiences.

JN: Writing anything
at all autobiographical involves taking some risks.One particularly compelling quality of Second
Shift is how deeply personal it is.Your
discussion of your husband Rick’s blindness in one eye and your resulting fear
in “The Plain of Sorrento” is one example.Another is your willingness to expose your own vulnerabilities in “Just
For Fun” and several other essays.Was
it a struggle to permit yourself to write about those aspects of yourself?

ST: That’s the million-dollar question, John.All writers, but especially nonfiction
writers, have to consider the risks of exposing their vulnerabilities.For me, it’s a matter of intention.In the beginning stages, I think of all my writing
as private because I only feel focused when I write as if nobody is ever going
to read what I’ve written. This is how I trick my mind out of worrying about what
other people think. This kind of worrying kills any piece of writing before I
type the first words. When I begin thinking about an essay or a story as
public, and therefore a piece I might publish, I always consider my
intentions.If the writing in the essay serves
simply as therapy, retribution, or purgation, then I’m wary of my intentions,
and I usually keep that piece private for a while longer.If the writing in the essay turns out
questions I think others will relate to, and invites the reader into a
dialogue, then I’m more likely to consider turning that essay into a public piece
that I’d consider publishing.

JN:…and that leads to
the question of truth versus imagination in the writing of autobiographical
material, doesn’t it?

ST: As I tell my nonfiction students, you have to tell the whole
truth, and sometimes that means giving details about yourself, or others, that
are private.Revealing these kinds of
truths can make you feel extremely vulnerable. However, if your intentions are
to honor and honestly explore yourself, or another human being, then even the
unflattering truths can make your subject more complicated. Keep in mind, too,
that all personal “truths” are really an individual’s perceptions.These perceptions must be as true as
possible, certainly not libelous, and they must be shaped well into an essay,
using language that engages.In other
words, the way we write an essay, the skillful shaping of vulnerable truths will
honor the subject, and help the writer to avoid a simplified spilling of emotions
on the page.Finally, the narrative “I”
of the personal essay must be just as multi-faceted as a well-drawn fictional
character.As with fiction, who really wants
to read about perfect people?Once,
while I was reading Paradise Lost, I began
to wonder why Milton made the characters of Adam and Eve so flat and simple. While I read the parts about Adam and Eve in
paradise, before the fall, I nearly fell into a stupor. Satan, on the other
hand, is a much more conflicted and complicated character.He has the gift of the
gab, as they say, and he articulates his vulnerabilities—his sorrows, fears,
and loss--much more engagingly.But he
is Satan!If I followed the conventional
wisdom, I wasn’t supposed to empathize with Satan. So I asked my husband, who
is a poet, why I preferred Satan’s character over the characters of Adam and
Eve in Paradise Lost.He said, “We like Satan because he most
resembles us.”

What he meant, of course, is that we are all frail and
vulnerable from time to time.As Phillip Lopate writes in The Art of the Personal Essay, some
vulnerability is essential to the personal essay because it would be insincere
to never admit that you are vulnerable.As Lopate explains, “Unproblematically self-assured, self-contained,
self-satisfied types will not make good essayists.”The skilled reader will turn away from that
narrator.So the struggle, always, with
writing personal essays is how to be self-aware, without being self-absorbed,
callow, insensitive or hurtful to others.

JN: So true.You accomplish making that connection with
the reader by revealing yours (and husband Rick’s) vulnerabilities in this collection,
something that definitely drew my interest.How does one weigh the pros and cons of self-exposure?

ST:It’s interesting
that you asked whether I had to struggle with giving myself permission to speak
in the essay “Just For Fun.”Of all the
essays in the collection, I struggled the most over how much of my own fear and
discomfort I should reveal.The strange
“gun incident” that launches that essay shook me to my core, and the events
that followed filled me with a tremendous sense of outrage. I started the essay
the day after the incident, and I wrote it straight through.In the first draft there were parts where the
narrative “I” sounds a bit angry.I kept
this piece private for a long time, paralyzed by worries about writing from
this vulnerable stance. Did the
narrative voice of this essay sound shrill, messy, unhinged?Surely there were far more violent crimes
being committed all around me, so what part of my story, which seemed mild
compared to the gun assault stories of others, seemed worthy of a public
discourse? Did I sound like victim?Above all, I didn’t want to write from the
stance of complete victimhood. Being a passive victim narrator would be even
worse than being an angry narrator.

Anger is the most extreme form of vulnerability for me because
it is the absence of control. It can ruin your health if you hold onto it, and
if you write purely from an angry stance it can ruin your writing because it’s
extremely difficult to maintain control from this perspective. Readers don’t
want to be bludgeoned by an uncontrollable stream of another person’s pain and
anger—especially female anger. Unfortunately, we are socially coded to
believe that a woman’s anger and outrage undermines her ability to be heard. We are brought up to feel, perhaps subconsciously,
that female anger is usually irrational, overblown.Female anger sometimes evokes more anger, not
understanding, and certainly not respect.I recently read an interesting article by Leslie Jamison in The New York Times about female anger
and sadness. Jamison posits that female sadness and rage are two parts of the
same emotion, and that women are still much more likely to reframe themselves
as sad, rather than angry, because our society still views angry women as
harpies and Medusas. Angry women are considered messy and unhinged, and it’s
still widely assumed that their pain is more likely to spin out of control, and
hurt those around them.Sad women, on
the other hand, summon sympathy.They
are typically perceived as self-controlled, elegant, and even desirable—as long
as they don’t get carried away and become eternal victims.In short, the melancholy, meditative female
narrator of an essay is much easier for people to relate to, and read.

About three years passed before I could look at the “Just
For Fun” essay more objectively. By this
time, the gun control debate had become even more volatile, but it had become
more socially acceptable for women to voice their anger. In 2017, when anger
became the dominant emotion across the country, the normative bonds that kept
women from expressing their full-on ire seemed to fall away. Suddenly, angry women
and female characters were being celebrated, rather than ridiculed as hysterics
and paranoids.It began to seem that my
“Just For Fun” essay might actually open a dialogue, rather than shut the
conversation down.I still believe that men and women should be
responsible for their own anger. I still believe we must be careful with
people, always, in life as well as in our writing. But writing that essay
taught me a whole lot about writing from an emotional stance that I used to avoid
entirely.

JN:Particularly impressive to me is the way you
juxtapose at least two seemingly different elements in most of your essays.For example, in “Hell Broth and Poisoned
Entrails” you combine the discussion of traditional fare with the Bubonic
plague!

Well, the juxtaposition in that essay came naturally.I really did go to the whisky shops on the
Royal Mile the first day my husband, son, and I were in Edinburgh.My husband bought me a bottle of lovely, but
deadly, lowland whisky as a gift, and I made the mistake of sipping that whisky
out of an elegant teacup while eating a picnic we made out of the hardy local
Scottish food—mostly organ meats.Around
this time, I’d been reading through all the books on our landlady’s bookshelf.Usually, it’s good to raid the bookshelves of
rental homes or apartments because they often hold books that contain
information that you wouldn’t find in a standard travel guide of a city.Our Scottish landlady was exceptionally
literary.I discovered The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie on her
shelves, and to this day I am a huge fan of Muriel Spark because I discovered
her in Edinburgh, where she was born, and where she set this wonderfully eerie novel.Perhaps I should have read this novel first,
but I read the book about the Bubonic plague instead. When I woke in the middle
of the night, still in a dream state that comes from drinking sweet lowland
whisky while jet lagged, that’s when I diagnosed myself with the Bubonic
plague.

The juxtaposition of those two elements—Scottish cooking and
the Bubonic plague-- came later, after the editors at Serving House Books—Walter
Cummins and Thomas E. Kennedy--sent out a simple yet brilliant prompt to all
the writers who published with their press: Write about the worst meal you ever
experienced.Don’t write about your
day-to-day fare; write about a food you ate under nightmare circumstances.This
prompt was brilliant because when you write about food you are never simply
writing about what’s on your plate.Food, or the lack of food, holds some of our most intense memories, so
writing about your best, or worst, food experiences allows you to delve into
memories both ecstatic and nightmarish. The prompt also contained the key word
“experience,” which demanded that I shape the food metaphor into a whole
narrative--a story, a poem, or an essay.

JN:This is all excellent advice for the MFA
student learning the craft of writing the personal essay.Please tell us more!

ST:In general, we
use juxtaposition to create metaphor, or to view a subject from a different
perspective. Food writing is one of the easiest ways to create metaphor through
juxtaposition. Writing about a specific food experience, enables you to explore
a whole range of experiences in a more oblique way that can heighten a reader’s
emotional response. MFK Fisher famously
wrote, “There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what
honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more
insistent hungers.We must eat.If, in the face of that dread fact, we can
find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less
full of human dignity.”When Tom and
Walter sent the food prompt to me, I was in the middle of writing a long novel
that was set in a time and place that was wild, so the hungers of my characters
were wild, and insistent.I was
beginning to realize how emotionally draining it can be to live in the heads of
such characters.I realized that
sometimes it’s just a good idea to take a step back, and stop taking myself so
seriously. While I used the food prompt to write an essay whose goal is to
entertain, the lesson it taught me about the use of juxtaposition has been
lasting.

JN: Details, details,
details.Can you relate to us something
of your process of gathering specific elements?Is there any specific goal you have in mind before you begin cataloguing
the details---what are you looking to do with these pieces?

ST:A friend of mine
once said--and I believe he was quoting Henry Miller—that a writer collects
details the way a man in a blue serge suit collects lint. If you don’t pick up
details naturally, then there are plenty of fun ways to train yourself to collect
details more deliberately.For instance,
when I know I’m going to write about a place, or the people who inhabit it, I
carry a pocket-sized notebook, and an old Powershot camera.First, I write down all the sensory details
as I experience them.I try to
experience the subject viscerally first, jotting down all the sights, the
textures, the smells, the sounds, and, sometimes, the tastes. Even if I don’t
feel a detail is important at the time, I write it down anyway because often
the less obvious details are the ones that end up being most important.Then, I take out my camera, and compose several
pictures of what I think I’m seeing, hearing, feeling.My old Powershot camera has a great device on
it called “creative shot.”After I’ve
composed the shots of what I think I’ve seen and experienced, I flip the camera
into “creative shot” mode, and the camera automatically composes five
additional photos.Each additional photo
crops the subject from a different angle.The camera automatically uses different filters, colors, and light. I don’t really share any of these creative
shots with anyone.I just use them to
force myself to look beyond my own initial perceptions, and to collect details
in ways I haven’t seen them before.

You can try this exercise with a regular phone camera too. Go
to a place and write down all the details you experience.Compose some pictures of what you think you
are seeing, and experiencing.Then,
return to your writing space and look at those pictures again. Write about
something that appears on the periphery of the pictures.What’s going on behind your subject, or off
to the side?The less-obvious details
that come to you as a surprise, the ones that recur in your imagination for
reasons you don’t quite understand, are often wellsprings for personal essays and
fiction. Virginia Woolf wrote about this most eloquently in her memoir, Moments of Being.She writes that we spend a good part of every
day not living consciously.We eat,
sleep, and work without paying much attention to what’s going on around
us.Then there are times, which she
calls “Moments of Being,” when we are shocked out of our everyday complacency.
She poses that the “job” of every writer is to learn how to identify metaphor
in these heightened moments of experience.Once identified, these moments are followed by the desire to explore the
subject by writing about it, and then examining the experience. She believed
that every writer has two selves.The past
self has sensory experiences, often without complete understanding.The present self continually searches the
past, interpreting, evaluating, and shaping the past into essays or
stories.This is the central impulse
behind storytelling, both in fiction and nonfiction.

JN:Wow, such really helpful tips!And they apply equally well to all
genres.I know you write and teach
poetry, as well as non-fiction and fiction, and it’s evident in the often
lyrical quality of these essays.Please
share with us how your background as a poet informs your essays.

ST:Poetry was the
first literary form I studied when I was an undergraduate, so whenever I return
to this form I feel a sense of familiarity, and safety.Often, when I’m trying to explore a new topic
for an essay that feels large and unwieldy, I’ll write it out as a poem first.The use of lyric strategies—the turning of
the line, the concentration on word selection, the juxtaposition of images—de-emphasizes
the sequential and linear, and allows me to get to the emotional center of my
material sooner.Once I find the
emotional core of what I’m exploring, I can de-lineate the original draft or
expand upon it in a more linear way.Or,
sometimes, the lyric structure remains.I just develop the poem into a long-form essay.

Also, in general, I’ve come to think that the essay form has
much more in common with poetry than it does with fiction.I believe this to be the case because the roots
of the essay are lyric.For instance, the
Japanese writer and Buddhist monk, Kenko, who was writing in the 13th
century, used a random mode of composition known as zuihitsu, which translates
as “follow the brush.”He, and his
counterparts, were downright suspicious of narrative forms because they
believed that formlessness was more sincere.Once something was put into a linear, narrative form it was no longer
the truth.So Kenko’s essays skip from
subject to subject, without any obvious links.Today’s lyric essay, which is basically an extended lyric poem, relies
upon those same lyric brushstrokes, the same density of language, the same use
of compression as a poem requires.

Anyway, the concept of the personal essay as purely a linear
narrative form is relatively recent. The roots of essay writing are much more expansive
and flexible, which could be why I’m drawn to writing them in the same way that
I’m drawn to writing poetry.

ST:I’m in the middle
of an ongoing travel and food-writing project that involves researching and
recording intangible heritage sites that can be found in the small towns of Southern
Italy. Unlike tangible heritage sites, like monuments or museums, the
intangibles are customs that are handed down through generations. There is a
whole biosphere on the Cilento Coast that is protected by UNESCO for its
intangibles, which include the anchovy fishing techniques that were brought
over by the Greeks 3,000 years ago, the shoulder-borne saint processions, and
even the traditional ways of making of some foods that are a part of the
Mediterranean diet. These customs rely upon
communal memory, and the transmission of information from one generation to the
next.As the members of the older
generation who remember these customs die out, and their children and
grandchildren scatter north to find employment in bigger cities, whole
communities risk forgetting these traditions.Our memories, personal and communal, form our identities, so if we lose
them we forget who we are.It’s this idea of memory, personal and
communal, that I hope to explore in a more concrete way through the food and
travel experiences.

JN:Susan, thank you so much.One doesn’t have to sit in one of your craft
classes to see how brilliant an instructor you must be.

John Newlin earned his MFA at Converse College (SC).His reviews and essays have appeared in Night Owl, Independent School, and South
85, where he is Review Editor.He
also writes reviews for the New York
Journal of Books.

ABOUT SUSAN TEKULVESusan Tekulve is the author of In the Garden of Stone, winner of the 2012 South Carolina First Novel Prize and a 2014 Gold IPPY Award. She’s also published two short story collections: Savage Pilgrims and My Mother’s War Stories. Her stories and essays have appeared in Shenandoah,The Georgia Review, New Letters, Best New Writing 2007, The Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Prairie Schooner, North Dakota Quarterly, Connecticut Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Crab Orchard Review, The Literary Review, Web Del Sol, Black Warrior Review, and The Kansas City Star. She has been awarded a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Scholarship and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholarship. An Associate Professor of English, she teaches in the BFA and MFA in creative writing programs at Converse College.